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SUBMITTED TO:

Mr. Ravi Sankar

Submitted by:

Rahul Aswal

RC6801B43

Reg no-10805265
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Electrodynamics was discovered and formalized in the

19th century. The 20th century was then profoundly affected
by its applications. A similar adventure may be
underway for quantum mechanics, discovered and formalized
during the last century. Indeed, although the laser
and semiconductor are already common, applications
of the most radical predictions of quantum
mechanics have only recently been conceived, and their
full potential remains to be explored by the physicists
and engineers of the 21st century.
The most peculiar characteristics of quantum mechanics
are the existence of indivisible quanta and of entangled
systems. Both of these lie at the root of quantum
cryptography (QC), which could very well be the first
commercial application of quantum physics at the single quantum
level. In addition to quantum mechanics, the
20th century has been marked by two other major scientific
revolutions: information theory and relativity. The
status of the latter is well recognized. It is less well
known that the concept of information, nowadays measured
in bits, and the formalization of probabilities are quite recent,1 although they have a tremendous impact
on our daily life. It is fascinating to realize that QC lies
at the intersection of quantum mechanics and information
theory and that, moreover, the tension between
quantum mechanics and relativityͶthe famous
Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky (EPR) paradox (Einstein
et al., 1935)Ͷis closely connected to the security of QC.
Let us add a further point for young physicists. Unlike
laser and semiconductor physics, which are manifestations
of quantum physics at the ensemble level and can
thus be described by semiclassical models, QC, and to an
even greater extent quantum computers, require a full
quantum-mechanical description (this may offer an interesting
challenge for physicists well trained in the
subtleties of their science).
This review article has several objectives. First, we
present the basic intuition behind QC. Indeed, the basic
idea is so beautiful and simple that every physicist and
student should be given the pleasure of learning it. The
general principle is then set in the broader context of
modern cryptology and made more precise
. Finally, the importantand difficult problems of eavesdropping and security
proofs are discussed in Sec. VI, where the emphasis
is more on the diversity of the issues than on formal
details. We have tried to write the different parts of this
review in such a way that they can be read independently.



   

Cryptography is the art of rendering a message unintelligible

to any unauthorized party. It is part of the
broader field of cryptology, which also includes cryptoanalysis,
the art of code breaking (for a historical perspective,
see Singh, 1999). To achieve this goal, an algorithm
(also called a cryptosystem or cipher) is used to
combine a message with some additional informationͶ
known as the keyͶand produce a cryptogram. This
technique is known as encryption. For a cryptosystem to
be secure, it should be impossible to unlock the cryptogram
without the key. In practice, this requirement is
often weakened so that the system is just extremely difficult
to crack. The idea is that the message should remain
protected at least as long as the information it contains
is valuable. Although confidentiality is the
traditional application of cryptography, it is used nowadays
to achieve broader objectives, such as authentication,
digital signatures, and nonrepudiation (Brassard,
1988).


  


    
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